In Eclipse I have the option to scale all font sizes for different UI elements individually:
Your screenshot looks about the same as mine. Same resolution, same size of menu’s and icons and text. It looks like the compatibility workaround is working and appears usable to me. Although screenshots of high dpi monitors can be misleading when comparing, as settings like Windows Scaling and the physical size of the monitor can be different.
For example without the workaround I get this:
Where you can see that all text is sharp but the main template editor is not taking up all the space and is far too small. Not really usable.
Unfortunately there is no Notepad or other application in your screenshot to show what size of menu items etc. you are expecting.
However reading through this thread I still don’t fully understand the problem. We don’t support settings text and other UI sizes individually in the Designer which you indeed can do in Eclipse. But if you set the global Windows Scaling factor correctly (175% in my case) the UI of the Designer will get the correct size.
You mentioned earlier in this thread that that affects all applications and not just the Designer. That is true but I would expect all applications to have a similar size. For me setting Windows Scaling to 175% and leaving the settings of all the other applications at there default (font sizes etc.) is working fine.
Can you tell me what happens if you do that and what is the current Windows Scaling setting on your machine?
This is not about “sharp text”, it is about tiny icons and tiny text. That is the same problem Eclipse suffered from until they added options for icon scling and text (font) sizes. Also this is not about personal opionions or preferences, its about ergonomics. The UI elements of other applications are either bigger, or scalable to personal needs and eyesight. It looks like we disgree about wthat the “correct size” is. You think it’s “okay”, but from an objective ergonomics standpoint it is not. See Adobe for example, in Photoshop (and other applications) there are settings for UI and font scaling in the preferences.
I have the following setup:
- 23" 1080p monitor Windows Scaling set to 100% (default)
- 27" 4k monitor Windows Scaling set to 175%
All other windows and application settings like font sizes etc. are default.
When I open the Designer on both monitors the physical size of text and buttons is about the same:
Left is the 23" standard dpi monitor right side is the 27" 4k monitor.
In this setup the sizes are the same as they are on non high dpi monitors.
I do understand your point that we should have a preference to allow you to set different text sizes etc like Eclipse has. That would allow users to tweak this even more to there own preferences which we currently can’t. If I understand it correctly this is what you are mainly requesting.
This is about text and icon sizes and that is what I requested to german support around may 2021, was that not relayed to you as promised? It was promised to be solved in the version that released in december 21, but then postponed. In the current state the UI is violating german workplace safety and health regulation laws.
I installed 2022.2 on monday and none of the promised improvements on scaling can be seen, where do I find them?
Is there an ETA for 2023.1?
I’m on 2022.2 and the issue persist on ultra wide monitors.
Changing the compatibility mode of the application has no results and changing the Windows system scaling is complete no, we can’t afford to upscale everything on the machine.
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As far as I know Connect 2023.1 will not support hi dpi monitors.
I’m wondering why changing the Windows system scaling is a complete no? That seems to be default and recommend way when you use a hi dpi monitor.
I have a high dpi monitor and I use Windows system scaling and that is working fine without the need to make additional changes to most applications.
Using the Windows scaling system does not work. You have either the option to scale ALL applications, which is not what we want for obvious reasons (other applications scale fine or have preferences settings for scaling, like Photoshop), or you try to set the DPI settings for this application in Windows compatibility settings which does not work at all with Designer. As I explained before. The icons and a lot of text stay tiny.
Edit: This application is Eclipse-based. The same problem was in Eclipse, there it was solved years ago by adding scaling options for icons and all text. The point is, regardless of what you say you think about icons and text sizes above: they are too small and that is highly inergonomic and even violates german workplace laws.
Because I don’t want everything to be bigger on the screen.
For instance I’ve set 120% for better readability, but I don’t want to go any higher
Changing the setting on my machine didn’t result in any visible result, I’ve tried all the three options.
The display resolution is 3440x1440
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Thanks for the feedback, I can now indeed reproduce your problem when I set Windows scaling to a custom scaling size like you did of 120%. Then indeed none of the compatibility modes do anything for the Designer.
Note that in the settings screen Windows is already giving a “not recommended” warning for custom scaling sizes. That scaling is then also applied to all displays even to my non high dpi ones.
If I don’t set a custom scaling level but just select 125% as the scaling level from the normal drop down then the compatibility workaround does work for Connect. Would that be a reasonable workaround for you?
Thanks for the feedback, I can confirm the solution proposed works. Although I would have preferred a 120% scaling, the downside is that the Connect interface is blurry (as already mentioned in previous comments). I can already see a headache rising after an hour of working on it.
All that said, thanks for finding out that my issue was with the custom scaling, but I think I will downgrade back to my previous 2021.2 until the issue is solved.
Indeed the text will be blurry with the workaround unfortunately.
There unfortunately are some technical reasons that makes it more difficult for Connect to support high dpi displays then it would be for a typical application. For instance we have embedded a browser and we already set a custom dpi level for that browser to be able to generate output of good quality. Changing this dpi depending on a high dpi display can cause rendering differences between computers and between the Designer and the actual output which is something that we don’t want.
I don’t understand your comment about downgrading to 2021.2, because as far as I know we did not support high dpi in any Connect version. I would expect that you will get the same results with that version?
Well this is odd then! I had 2021.2 previously and never had any trouble of blurriness nor empty spaces around the viewport of the templates, I had the custom windows scaling set to 120% too and launched the Connect application with default settings (no compatibility shenanigans).
Maybe the blurriness was still present but was less than the one I am experiencing with 2022.2, and I never noticed? I’m unsure if I will downgrade at this point.
Anyway, supporting a custom scaling would be a big plus for me, 125% is too much and 120% was “just right”. I understand I am one in hundreds of users, but who knows, perhaps it’s doable?
I did some more testing and this is getting more confusing as we dig deeper.
With 2021.2 and custom scaling set to 120% it indeed seems to work fine, also with 125% scaling, in both cases no workarounds are required.
With 2022.2.1 the same settings don’t work correctly. Now there has been one change that seems to have caused this. Can you open “C:\Program Files\Objectif Lune\OL Connect\Connect Designer\Designer.ini” and remove the “-Dswt.autoScale=quarter” line from the file and save it. Create a backup before doing this. Disable all the compatibility workarounds and start the Designer.
For me the behavior is then the same as it was for 2021.2 it works fine with 120%, 125% and 150%. Although you will see that the welcome screen and template is rendered a bit too small. For the template editor you can easily zoom in. All the icons are also too small but at 120% that is not so noticeable at 150% it is more noticeable. These issue are not new they also occur in 2021.2.
At 175% it is not working correctly things are cut off that level is basically unworkable.
Anyway I think by removing that line from the Designer.ini you should get the same behavior as you had in 2021.2 without the need to downgrade.
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Awesome! 
I confirm that the suggested solution works perfectly! No shenanigans in the High DPI compatibility settings and custom scaling at 120%. Also zero blurriness.
May I ask if there are downsides I can expect to encounter with the setting -Dswt.autoScale=quarter commented out?
Actually the designer.ini seems to be a way to a solution. Similar as to Eclipse I changed the scaling settings, I commented out
-Dswt.autoScale=half
and added
-Dswt.autoScale=125
-Dswt.autoScale.method=nearest
The Autoscale value being a percentage. That actually scales the icons and other parts of the UI as wanted, but now the center document view has problems. If this could be solved the designer.ini setting may be a usable workaround.
@Maxiride there are no downsides with commenting out the -Dswt.autoScale=quarter section as far as I know, it is basically what we did in the older version.
@Xanathon the document view size issue is something that maybe we can resolve. I would need to take a deeper look later into that. It would require a change in the software itself though.
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Hi - I have tried everything also. Is there any update on this. It is very hard to work on anything with the screen so small. I am on a laptop using 2022.2 and it was fine until I updated to 2022.2.
Thank you
I did solve with this proposed workaround: Connect Designer not scaling for 4K screens - Designer - Upland OL User community
Have you tried it too?